ios14 car play poor music sound quality

Hello salvatore203,

Thank you for reaching out in Apple Support Communities. We understand you're experiencing poor sound quality, when you listen to music in CarPlay.

Relying on superb quality sound for CarPlay is important, and we'd like to help.

From the description you provided, it looks like you're on iOS 14. We recommend to update your iPhone to iOS 14.0.1. This can help provide software improvements on your device: Update your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch

In addition, please follow steps one through seven in this article: If you need help with CarPlay These steps are relevant to the behavior you're experiencing and can help.

Please keep us posted with the results.

Best regards.

my personal phone (xs max) sound quality is a nightmare. Sounds great on bluetooth. Running 14.1. Swapped it with my work phone and sounded fine (SE 14.0). Its been working fine up until today.

No, not that I have seen. I was having issues on 14.1 too. Mine isn’t constant though. It started the other day and went for the whole day. I swapped cables , didnt work, and then tried it with my work phone and it was fine, switched back to my XS Max and it sounded horrible again. The next day it started working fine.

Does anyone have any updates on this. Sound quality is still terrible with usb connection. Just upgraded to 14.2

Same problem. iPhone 11. CarPlay over USB. Latest iOS 13 version. Everything OK. Update iOS 14. Everything OK for about 1 hour. Then the sound starts with crackling sound. Drop outs. And drowns sometimes in completely distortion. All of a sudden sound comes back and after 5 minutes same crackling sound again. Now I did the update to 14.01. It seems to be a bit better... I'm using only Apple Music on my CarPlay. No other apps. As clean as possible. I have the feeling that there is a problem with ? caches or buffers? Now after 30 minutes or something when the distortion starts, I put the radio on for a while. And then I switch again to Apple Music and everything is perfect again...for 30 minutes or so....